Pastern
Pronunciation
- UK IPA: /ˈpæstÉ™n/, /ˈpæstÉœËn/
- US IPA: /ˈpæstəɹn/
Origin
From Old French pasturon (French pâturon), from pasture ‘shackle’ (from Latin pastoria ‘shackle for pastured animal's foot’) + diminutive suffix.
Full definition of pastern
Noun
pastern
(plural pasterns)- The area on a horse's leg between the fetlock joint and the hoof.
- 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998), page 158:It was quite impossible to ride over the deeply-ploughed field; the earth bore only where there was still a little ice, in the thawed furrows the horse's legs sank in above its pasterns.
- 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin 2013, p. 227:Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern.
- (obsolete) A shackle for horses while pasturing.
- (obsolete) A patten.